Disk Pressure and Slow Storage

Slow or saturated storage shows up as application launch delays, profile-load stalls and general “everything is slow” complaints that are easy to misattribute.

How to diagnose

Watch disk active time and queue length during the complaint window. A disk pinned near 100% active time with a growing queue indicates I/O is the bottleneck.

How to resolve

Free space on nearly-full drives, exclude large sync folders from real-time scanning where appropriate, and replace failing or end-of-life drives.